The Blog Medic

In this series of short entries entitled “One Action a Day”, every exercise is designed to help corporate bloggers gain insight into the readership or inspire for future posts by looking at your site statistics. Best of all, it should only take a few minutes of your day, so you can get on with the many other projects you’re responsible for!

In the last entry, I suggested looking at the top keywords your readers use to discover your site. Today, we’ll look at your referral traffic.

Referrers are the fellow bloggers or website owners who link to you. If you’re using Google Analytics, look at Referring Sites, under the Traffic Sources tab, and expand the list beyond the default top 10. How many of these do you recognise? Are there some unknown or new sources?

Click through to their site and educate yourself on what the site is about, who runs it and in what light your site was mentioned. If it was mentioned in a positive or neutral light, why not leave a comment thanking the author for the unexpected link or drop them an email? On the other hand, if the post stinks, take your time and be level-headed in your answer. Remember that if you can solve this person’s problem, you may find yourself with a new brand evangelist.

Make it a regular activity to look at your referring sites, and build relationships with their owners. Not only are these inbound links valuable in terms of SEO, but you’ll be growing your network and building a livelier community around your business.

Read all “One Action a Day” tips.

With the responsibilities of a company blogger often stretching beyond purely writing a daily entry, time can be a bit short. In depth analysis and personal education, two habits essential to quality writing, get neglected.

In this series of short entries entitled “One Action a Day”, every exercise will help you gain insight into the readership or inspire you for future posts by looking at your site statistics. Best of all, it should only take a few minutes of your day.

What are the top 10 search terms people use to get to your site? Have a look at the keywords list, found under “Traffic Sources” in Google Analytics. Now, look past those obvious 10 and look at the lesser-used terms. Do any of the terms surprise you?

We often get in a rut and use the same jargon every day, so what new words could you use to describe your business well? There’s nothing wrong with using the thesaurus or asking colleagues how they present the company to friends. Think of broader terms as well as industry-specific ones.

This will give you hints as to what themes to cover in your entries, widen the net of the search terms you rank highly for and make your writing more interesting and colourful!

Read all past “One Action a Day” tips.

In this series, I’ll be writing about the challenges of becoming a corporate blogger, from choosing your company and building a community to getting the right technical setup and getting support from your board of directors.

You’ll find the full series here.

The best way to make your role as company blogger as productive and fruitful as possible is to have the support of your colleagues and management. Getting everyone internally on your side should make it easier to go ahead with wild and wonderful ideas, since they’ll be confident that you can be trusted and are measuring results of every new idea you put in place.

While we may be creative softies, those sitting across the table are likely to think in measurable terms and KPIs where every decision is backed by hard numbers, so it’s worth learning to speak their language.

In a future post, we’ll look at how to communicate the more subjective qualitative information you’ll encounter but first, let’s focus on the hard stuff.

These hard stats are easy numbers to acquire so once you’ve picked your analytics package (Lee Odden lists 20 tools for blogs, some of which are better than others - I recommend Google Analytics to get you started), these are the first numbers I suggest reporting to your team on a weekly or at least monthly basis.

1. Unique visitors: How many people in total have visited your site during a given period? Note the difference between “visits” and “visitors” as a single visitor can come back for multiple visits. Count each visitor once for a better gauge of your readership.
2. Loyalty: How often do readers come back in that period?
3. Top content: Which articles, categories or tags have had the most readers?
4. Referring sources: How many inbound links? What kind of traffic do they bring in?
5. Keyword analysis: What keywords are leading users to your site? Are they relevant?
6. Geography: If your product is limited geographically, are your readers in regions where they can act on their interest? Can they buy, order or visit it?

Note that if you can, find out the IP addresses used by your office and add them to the exclusion list in your analytics package. This will give you a more accurate figure of the “real” traffic to the blog, since it’ll filter out the many hits you create when pottering around maintaining the site.

In addition to these basic figures, I would suggest reporting the number of subscribers to your RSS feed if you’re using a service like Feedburner to manage your feeds, as well as Technorati score and authority ranking, on which you should register/claim your blog.

Next, we’ll look at reporting softer measures like opinion shift, discovering your evangelists and forecasting traffic, but this should get you started.